the need for quality in healthcare

11 Apr 2011

For every drowned and pulseless child rescued by intensive care,
there are many more who don't make it—and not just because their
bodies are too far gone. Machines break down; a team can't get
moving fast enough; a simple step is forgotten. Such cases don't get
written up in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, but they are the norm.
Intensive-care medicine has become the art of managing extreme
complexity—and a test of whether such complexity can, in fact, be
humanly mastered.